‘Enjoy the service,’ said the personable young man in Cape
Town, as he handed me a computer-produced family service sheet. His friendly
greeting momentarily took me aback. Where had I heard these words before? Why,
in English pubs! Go into the Red Lion or the Nag’s Head for a
meal nowadays, and you’ll receive not so much a request as the command ‘Enjoy
your meals!’ By the third hymn, I’m waiting for the personable young man (or
someone) to come and ask me, ‘Is everything all right with your service?’
Thankfully, I’m left to take part in it without interruption.

Have a nice day

If you’ve experienced the friendliness and service standards
to be found in American eateries, you’ll not mind this bit of their ‘have a
nice day’ culture invading our shores. Is a church, however, the same sort of
animal as a restaurant? A restaurant has customers, whom the proprietors hope
will come back, having enjoyed their meal. A church is a very different
proposition. Its Sunday liturgy is the expression of a number of things: where
the church has come from, where it is now, where it wants to go to.

My family service took place in southern Africa’s fastest
growing suburb. New people are arriving all the time, and the church is anxious
to make them feel wanted and welcomed. Many English parishes (where once the
problem was that worshippers knew each other only too well, and a cloak of
anonymity over Sunday worship helped to keep them, if not on speaking terms, at
least on praying ones) now make strenuous efforts to greet you at the door.
Talking to people who have joined us in recent years, some from non-churchgoing
backgrounds, the initial welcome they received as they nervously crossed the
threshold for the first time was crucial.

So far, so practically adjusted to the nomadic Way We Live Now.
Even so, my friendly greeter still left me somehow disturbed. Why?

Enjoy!

The deep springs of Enjoyment go back a long way. Seated in the
Greek roots of our culture lie hedonism and epicureanism, the way of looking at
life first proposed by Aristippus (435–356BC) and later refined by Epicurus
(341–270BC). What remains of their writings is fragmentary, yet strangely
contemporary in its content. Epicurus, of whose work three letters remain, could
write comfortably for the National Secular Society. Arguing against Plato’s
map of the supernatural, he claimed that truth was bounded by sensation: if you
couldn’t sense it, you couldn’t believe in it.

Death, therefore, being the end of sensation, was the end of
everything. Peace of mind and a contemplation of our state after death were, to
him, mutual exclusives. It was, at best, a man-centred way of perceiving life
and ethics, ignoring the gods and their demands. Looking at their gods and their
fickle, vindictive natures, one can understand their desire to live without
them.

These roots of anthropocentric ethics, though, find their way
not only (and predictably) into the writings of hoary old atheists like David
Hume and Jeremy Bentham, but also into the thought of Christendom as expressed,
for example, in the utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill. Aristippus was the first
of this school to use what became known as the felicific calculus, the
calculation of happiness. For him, transient, intense pleasure weighed less than
moderate, lasting ones.

The good life, for him, was ataraxia – ‘freedom from
pain in the body and from trouble in the mind’. How many human aspirations are
enveloped here! The oriental religionist, the non-religious materialist, the
browser through holiday brochures and the aromatherapy addict can all find
justification in enjoyment. So, of course, can the mother contemplating
abortion, the married man looking at adultery, the alcoholic, the drug addict
– it must be all right, I enjoy it!

In a society which, following Epicurus, tries to live only by
what we immediately know, enjoyment will mould our expectations of church life.

Comfort ye

How different, how nakedly demanding, are the scriptures! I
found myself wandering through the middle of Psalm 119 recently, and there one
is repeatedly confronted by an outlook on life which holds no place for
self-indulgence. To give a flavour of the passage:

verse 67: Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I obey
your word.

verse 71: It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might
learn your decrees.

There is no hint of the worship of enjoyment here. Our present
state is to be dictated to by the requirements of God’s agenda. Our place is
to learn to obey, and if to do so requires suffering, then so be it. It has to
be said that if he chooses to bless us with what is enjoyable, then we
should choose to ‘forget not all his benefits’ (Psalm 103.2).There
is a self-imposed misery summed up by the nineteenth-century Punch
cartoon which showed a little girl sitting in abject misery on an iron-hard pew,
over the caption ‘Her Third Sermon’; even so, we have now reached the
conclusion that all sermons should be short and comfortable. Worship should
occupy no more than an hour, and be unchallenging. Penitential exercises like
the keeping of Lent can be left to a few (probably neurotic) keenies.

Whatever he sends us, if we endure faithful to his call on our
life, we will grow the fruit of the Spirit, whose second characteristic is joy.
Like Our Lord on the road to Emmaus, it comes unseen, unbidden, to those who
walk with him, even when such walking takes us through tears and sadness. It
cannot be aimed at or possessed; but to the obedient it is given, and (as
Nehemiah 8.10 promises) becomes their strength.

Like every Christian generation before us, we have to choose
between the easy way of pandering to our own selfish needs or the painful way of
being changed into God’s image. I read recently that it is estimated that 2.7
million people have opted out of the rat race and deliberately chosen a simpler,
less expensive way of life. I would like to think that the majority of them were
Christians, opting for a godly life style; but as long as all we’re meant to
do with our service is enjoy it, I have my doubts.

Hugh Baker used to be vicar of five churches in south
Staffordshire; they’ve taken one off him, so now he has four to enjoy.